What is to spend 16 hours on the “kyiv Express” in Ukraine

I arrived at Warsaw Wschodnia station an hour before my planned departure, giving myself time to relax and take a piece to eat. After dragging and looking at people flooding and getting out of the station, I devoured a little Caffè Nero sandwich.

It was in the evening, just a little before 6 p.m., I arrived on the platform a few minutes earlier and walked to my assigned train train, showing my ticket to an employee of Ukrzaliznytsia, in Ukraine, the State of State.

I got on the train and walked to my dormant cabin at the end of the car, right next to one of the two bathrooms.

The blue train was weakly lit, dated and had an obsolete smell. My room was the size of a large closet, but I had everything for me, and it was surprisingly comfortable. I hung my coat and took a few minutes to settle down and organize my things.

The room had a three -bed berth, with the bed in the low middle to act like a backrest for the lower bed, where you were sitting (finally, I raised the middle bed to sleep).

Besides the only window, there were hangers, a small folding chair, a ladder, a storage grid and a small desk with a mirror that opened and hosted an electrical outlet.

It was a Spartan space, certainly not the luxury train that Western leaders used to go to Ukraine in the past, but it was enough for what I needed to do.

The cabin was equipped with three plastic packages containing leaves, a pillowcase and a towel. What looked like sleeping pads and pillows was on the upper berth, and the blankets were on a storage rack. (I did not end up using them.)

The cabin was also filled with two bottles of water, but I wrapped mine, as well as pringles, cookies and mentos to hold back until I arrive in kyiv. I thought there was a good chance that I was standing overnight and that I was hungry.

The train moved away from the station shortly after its scheduled departure time. At this point, it was dark outside. About 15 minutes later, someone came to check my tickets.

I used Google Translate to communicate with him, and he tried to speak English at some point. The only word I could really have the exchange was “Trump”.

My declaration trip came just after a controversial meeting of the White House between the American president and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and as the Trump administration was putting pressure on Ukraine to conclude unfavorable agreements.

The train felt like the travel quickly, even if I didn’t know what our speed was. They may have said something, but I’m not talking about Ukrainian.

The journey through Poland was bumpy and noisy. During the first three hours of my trip, I prepared for interviews in kyiv, I caught up the news, I ate snacks and watched a little television on my phone. The cell coverage was surprisingly good at this stage (she got worse).

It was dark outside, so I couldn’t see a lot of Poland beyond certain dispersed houses, buildings and reverbacs. From time to time, the train stopped briefly in a station while we got closer to Ukraine.

Polish customs started a little after 9:30 p.m., almost four hours after the start of the trip. A customs agent walked in the corridor to check the passports and chase us from the European Union. The train did not move for more than an hour, but ultimately, it started to roll again.

Ten minutes later, I received an employee saying that we had reached the Ukrainian customs.

I gave my passport to a Ukrainian soldier and recovered it 30 minutes later with my long -awaited Ukrainian stamp.

At this point, with the change of time (Ukraine has one hour in advance on Poland), it was almost 1 a.m. and I was super tired.

Twenty minutes later, we entered a massive warehouse, where the train was prepared to pass European tracks to the wider Ukrainian tracks built during the Soviet Union. Although the Russian army has struck the railways and rail centers, the Ukraine rail lines were surprisingly well maintained, most of the trains operating on time.

The following hour was filled with the inpêchable and piercing sounds of the machines and coughing and snoring which penetrated the thin walls separating my room and that next door.

During the next hours after we finally approached, our train crossed the Ukrainian campaign. I was in and out of sleep, but when the sun got up, I abandoned entirely and I took my first view of the Eastern European country by the window.

While we are approaching Kyiv-Pasazhyrrskyi station, the landscape is slowly passed from rural to Urban, and we arrived in the Ukrainian capital just before 11 a.m., it was cold and busy outside when I was waiting for a ride at my hotel.

Go out on the ordinary concrete station, I renounced fresh air before it turns out to me that I always had the same 4 pm trip to Warsaw to wait impatiently.